Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Tol'able David
The youngest son of a mountain family waits to be treated as a man, and is given the mail to carry when it finally happens.
Henry King took a crew to the Blue Ridge and came back with the American pastoral at its most exact: wash-day, a dog on the porch, a mail hack that runs once a day down the valley road. Richard Barthelmess plays David Kinemon as a boy everybody calls tolerable, which is to say not yet. Then three men on the run from somewhere worse take a farm up the creek, and the film turns, without changing its manners, into a siege. Watch the mail sack. David is told it is the United States in his keeping, and the whole last reel is the question of whether a boy can deliver it.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Henry King
- Photographed by
- Henry Cronjager
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Richard Barthelmess, a year apart, as the farm boy who does the decent thing. For Griffith he is the son who crosses the ice for a fallen woman; for Henry King, the son who carries the mail through a family of killers. Two pastorals, and in both the country is where the violence lives.